BHM & WHM artist - Harmonia Rosales

Bridging Black History Month & Women's History month, we focus on Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, who has centered her work on Black female empowerment by depicting Yoruba religion and its synchronicity with Greek gods and catholic saints.

By capturing everyone’s attention through the visual parallelisms with Renaissance imagery, she takes this opportunity to tell the stories of the Black subjects in her paintings. In reimagining the work of the masters, Rosales opens a conversation around the depiction of white hierarchy and the representation of beauty in fine art, but her work also functions as a way to heal and promote self-love.

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Birth of Oshun (above)

A stunning woman with short hair and rich caramel-brown skin floats toward the viewer. She is Oshun, the orisha of love, desire, fertility, hope, and harmony. On the left dressed in red, Oya the goddess of winds and storms supports Obatalá, in white, the creator of all humans. The orisha of the ocean Yemayá, identified by her cowrie shells, welcomes her sister and the goddess of “sweet waters,” or rivers, to shore. She readies a golden robe decorated with sunflowers, Oshun’s color and floral attributes. Oshun’s golden markings, suggestive of vitiligo, tell the patakí of her saving humanity by transforming into a peacock and flying up to Olodumare to beg for heavy rains during a severe drought. Her arduous journey into the sun burned the feathers from her head (hence her sheared hair). Swirling in the wind, the peacock feathers hint at Oshun’s sacrifice.

The Birth of Oshun appears familiar because the artist cloaks the painting in classical mythology and Renaissance artistic motifs. Modeled after Sandro Botticelli’s fifteenth-century panel Birth of Venus, Rosales’s version supplants her Roman counterpart. Critiquing Eurocentric ideals of beauty, the painting makes space for Black female empowerment and beauty of all types.

Harmonia Rosales - Virtuous Woman

Rosales re-imaginations of European models upend the canons of western culture, making space for Black female empowerment in the grand narrative of history. Centering the Black figure of Eve as the protagonist, Rosales presents the perfect woman. Inscribed within both a circle and a square, Rosales’s Eve subverts Leonardo da Vinci’s design of an ideal human body as represented by a man (Vitruvian Man). At a height of six feet tall, Virtuous Woman towers over Leonardo’s diminutive notebook sketch. The painting forms part of Rosales’s early artistic journey to challenge white, patriarchal, hegemonic systems.

Harmonia Rosales America's Civilized

Inspired by Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Rosales’s America’s Civilized challenges the colonial foundations of America’s civilization.

What does civilization mean in America? That is the key question of this painting. The two figures represent Indigenous peoples, the original inhabitants of this country, and the first Africans kidnapped and brought to America. Wearing lace, colorful silks, jewelry, and expressions of discomfort, the women remind viewers that America’s idea of civilization was at the same time the brutal colonization of foreign land and peoples. Dressed in sharp contrast to their respective cultures, the figures seem like fish out of water, surrounded by a new colonial capital culture binding and suffocating them. It’s a painting of beauty and horror, as one oscillates between the figures’ luxurious textiles, intricate patterns, and lustrous pearls to the dismal background of long-voyage galleon ships of the transatlantic slave trade.

This Weekend [Black History Month]

Next Week

Harmonia Rosales  The Creation of God

Rosales presents the first human as a Black woman formed from the clay of the earth, the reddish-brown markings of her new body echoing the rusty land around her. The first woman Eve reaches for God’s life-giving touch. In another moment God will imbue her with energy, also known as the life-force, or asé. One cannot help but notice God is depicted as a strong Black woman, her protective pink covering forming a womb around the twelve nude figures. In the artist’s words, “…when you consider that all human life came out of Africa, the Garden of Eden and all, then it only makes sense to paint God as a Black woman, sparking life in her own image.”

By subverting Michelangelo’s well-known fresco, Rosales paints Black female empowerment into history, and simultaneously challenges hegemonic systems of belief. Created for her first solo exhibition Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony in 2017, the painting visualizes Rosales’s underlying challenge throughout her body of work: “Why have we accepted Eurocentric perceptions of beauty and historical narratives for so long?”